Monday, June 19, 2006
I worked on organizing images Friday night and some Saturday, but took Sunday off completely, to enjoy some relaxed time with family instead. Back to the images this morning, and finally have them all together and sequenced; the final tally is 554 (which at 5 seconds per means I have about 6 images too many, no problem). The most tedious part came this afternoon, renaming them all 001-554, then had a little trouble transferring them from one laptop to the other (cyclic redundancy error messages) but eventually managed to do so. Just as I’d finishing Ali and a friend of his showed up—I’d emailed Ali last week asking to help me set up an animation for the images but he hadn’t received the message until yesterday when he reviewed his bulk mail folder (why .edu messages, ones that aren’t sent to more than one person, end up in bul mail is beyond me). Anyhow, I told him I was resigned to using a slideshow approach now but we had a thorough discussion about other possibilites, including Flash, Powerpoint, Premiere, Dreamweaver, and so on, and even tried a couple of methods out to see how difficult they were. This was an interesting, unexpected meeting at which I learned a few things even if in the end I decided to stick with the original plan out of simplicity’s sake. Ali did take a cd of the images with him and may make something of them but I’m not expecting him to get too crazy over it and told him so.
The other thing that happened during their visit is that my eBooks were delivered, about 1,050 copies in 3+ heavy boxes, and I’m glad to see them at last. I like how the packaging came out, and when I finally had a chance to review briefly a copy tonight I was gratified by the contents and am very pleased by the project as a whole. Close readers will find a few strange errors in the texts but otherwise the thing works and is a reasonable output of the ground I’ve covered in recent years. The little typographic errors (some of which I have no idea how they happened) are minor and are no cause for discouragement. I’ll be proud to circulate them and have already started to do so on campus.
The day whizzed by (I also sent out some publicity emails, printed some posters and final versions of the poems); the only unfortunate thing that happened was that the tech setup for Wednesday’s performance that was supposed to happen was cancelled at the last minute because a foreign dignitary from Vietnam showed up on campus and the place that the big meeting (red carpet, President of the University type of affair) was happening was in the FCM office, just above the atrium where the show is going to take place. So we had to postpone it again, until late tomorrow afternoon. In the scheme of things this shouldn’t be a problem, though it means a long day tomorrow because I also have to rehearse with Siew Wai as well. Beforehand I have to script the whole thing, outlining what computer does what and when, but should have plenty of time to work all of that out no problem.
The other thing that happened during their visit is that my eBooks were delivered, about 1,050 copies in 3+ heavy boxes, and I’m glad to see them at last. I like how the packaging came out, and when I finally had a chance to review briefly a copy tonight I was gratified by the contents and am very pleased by the project as a whole. Close readers will find a few strange errors in the texts but otherwise the thing works and is a reasonable output of the ground I’ve covered in recent years. The little typographic errors (some of which I have no idea how they happened) are minor and are no cause for discouragement. I’ll be proud to circulate them and have already started to do so on campus.
The day whizzed by (I also sent out some publicity emails, printed some posters and final versions of the poems); the only unfortunate thing that happened was that the tech setup for Wednesday’s performance that was supposed to happen was cancelled at the last minute because a foreign dignitary from Vietnam showed up on campus and the place that the big meeting (red carpet, President of the University type of affair) was happening was in the FCM office, just above the atrium where the show is going to take place. So we had to postpone it again, until late tomorrow afternoon. In the scheme of things this shouldn’t be a problem, though it means a long day tomorrow because I also have to rehearse with Siew Wai as well. Beforehand I have to script the whole thing, outlining what computer does what and when, but should have plenty of time to work all of that out no problem.
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 6:36 AM 
